


Entanglement

by jumpsoap



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Amnesia, Android Ignis Scientia, Android Prompto Argentum, Canon-Typical Ableism, M/M, Minor Character Death, Peril, Rescue Mission, Sexual Content, canon blind character, mild body horror, mild psychological horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2019-11-13
Packaged: 2021-01-29 18:51:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 9
Words: 15,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21414979
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jumpsoap/pseuds/jumpsoap
Summary: Life wasn’t always perfect on Starbase Lucis, but Prompto and Ignis found each other there, and as their lives and souls became entangled, their happiness flourished. Their happily-ever-after is shattered when the Niflheim Empire makes a surprise attack on the base, and Ignis is left alone and blinded in the aftermath. However, an act of love in their past may have created a way for Ignis to find Prompto and rescue him from the Empire. (Written for the 2019 Promnis Big Bang)
Relationships: Prompto Argentum/Ignis Scientia
Comments: 31
Kudos: 26
Collections: 2019 Promnis Big Bang





	1. Chapter 1

**Entanglement**

**a science fiction Promnis fic**

**story by jumpsoap**

**art by SpiritMuse**


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome to my fic for the Promnis 2019 Big Bang!! A lot of people encouraged, helped, and inspired me while I was writing this, both during the Big Bang and waaay back when I first came up with this premise and talked about it on my former tumblr. To keep things brief here, I'll limit my thanks to the Big Bang Moderators for putting this together and seeing it through; my editor, Kathy for helping to keep this comprehensible* and giving me some really lovely pep talks; and of course [SpiritMuse](https://twitter.com/spiritmuse) for the beautiful art you saw in Chapter 1. [Click here](https://i.imgur.com/nRx8DfZ.jpg) to view that art in its full, non-compressed glory. 
> 
> _*any elements that remain incomprehensible are entirely my fault_
> 
> If you'd like to hear the music I had on repeat while I was working on this, check out my [spotify playlist](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5er9euALtb2rlsAO5EVLjS?si=kRVS6e9CT0OPeKoqgZ6GIQ).
> 
> See the end notes on this chapter for a detailed content warning and how you can contact me if you want to have a private conversation.
> 
> Enjoy!

_He was activated._

He was activated. 

_He was somewhere new. Cold, sterile. He didn’t know it. He didn’t know anything._

He was lying on a familiar floor, in a pile of other scrapped machinery waiting to be repaired or repurposed.

_A light shone into his eye, then moved. He could feel its warmth on his face where his other eye should be, but he couldn’t see it anymore. There was a numbness, a dark space where his other eye should be seeing the bright light._

_There was something missing._

In the time that followed the Niflheim attack on Starbase Lucis, Ignis received no optical input. He simply lay in the scrap heap along with the other machinery waiting to be trashed or repaired, jagged skin and exposed circuits where his eyes used to be and a determined nothingness where his thoughts and feelings used to be. 

He had set himself to the most extreme level of power saving, and only received the most minimal auditory and kinetic inputs from the frantic bustle of damage control going on all around him.

He stayed that way, unnoticed by any of the humans or other droids, for hours that faded into days. Until that burst of light brought all his systems surging back to full power.

The light did not come from any source near his body. It was shining into an eye that had not been torn from his head by an explosion, but one that he had taken out himself, and given away.

Ignis came back to himself sluggishly, slow in initializing because he hadn’t bothered to queue up any place-holding sequences before powering down. He hadn’t expected to have a reason to wake back up.

He didn’t know where his other eye was, or how far away, but that was information he could discover. All that truly mattered was that the eye was receiving input. That meant the unit housing his eye was still out there, somewhere.

Ignis hauled himself to his feet, limbs unsteady from damage and neglect. He heard scraps raining down around him, and a gasp from a nearby person, startled by his movement. He was still focused on what he was seeing, somewhere far away from here. The bright light had drawn back, revealing a remote-controlled repair console. Its many arms held flashlights, scalpels, soldering irons, and other tools. It was all blurry, out of focus.

He recorded the information for a more thorough examination, later, and moved his attention to his hands, sliding along the wall as he tried to get his bearings. 

He paused when someone called to him.

“Mister Scientia?” 

Even if he did not recognize the voice, only one person on the base ever addressed him that way. “Talcott,” he answered.

“Do you need help getting to Maintenance?” Ignis couldn’t see what kind of expression the human boy had, but he sounded tense, rushed.

“If you could just describe to me where I am now, I can find my way myself.” The thought of being guided or accompanied by Talcott made him feel as though something was burning inside of him. And Ignis did not care to explain that he was not planning to visit the Maintenance bay.

After getting his bearings from the boy, Ignis moved through the crowd by feeling and hearing. Busy, anxious people jostled by him as he went. 

He was trying to access a mental map, to visualize his location and simulate a vision of the empty hallways, at least. But it seemed his malfunction extended beyond the damage to his optical receptors. He struggled to maintain his sense of direction while continuing to record the visual input he was receiving.

He found his way to an elevator and thanked the stars that he had already downloaded the software he needed to understand the Braille markings on the controls. 

The hangar level of the starbase was considerably more peaceful than the residential level he had come from. Either the invading forces hadn’t done much damage here, or what they had done was a lower priority than the crises elsewhere. 

“That you, Ignis?” someone called, and he turned toward her voice.

“Cindy,” he answered, relieved. “Yes, it’s me.”

“Oh, honey…” the other droid said, her quick footsteps approaching. “What did they do to you?”

Ignis let her touch his face. He was glad he didn’t have to look upon Cindy, though it was hard to admit it to himself. Over the years she had spent with Lucis, she had undergone some significant cosmetic modifications, but her underlying build and coloration… It would be too familiar. He thought he might not be able to bear it.

“My condition is of no matter,” Ignis said. “I need your help.”

“‘Course,” she said, “I’ll scrounge up some replacement—” 

“No. No replacements.” He waited, but when she didn’t object, he continued, “I need to update my programming. Will you help me access the database?”

She helped him, neither prying nor doting on him. He followed her to a corner of the room with a terminal. She opened it up and logged in while Ignis opened his shirt, tearing his undershirt open, to plug the cords she handed him into the ports there.

He slid down against the wall as the database interfaced with his own operating system; the frisson of the initial handshake gave way to a feeling of vastness, a galaxy's worth of information lapping at his shores. 

“Gonna be alright?” Cindy asked him.

“Thank you, Cindy,” he said instead of answering. It was a dismissal, and he was grateful that she took it as such. She left him alone with the unfathomable mind of the Lucis’s database.

Although it would never cease to be a disorienting experience, he was no stranger to Lucis’s database. He found the information he needed with ease, queuing up several large folders of information for download.

Now he only needed to wait as his body charged and his mind filled with data, schematics, and tactics.

Droids did not dream quite like humans did, but Ignis needed to be ready to go as soon as the transfer was complete. In order to keep his processing units warm, he turned his attention inward and accessed some pleasant memories...

...

The first time Ignis encountered the droid named Prompto, there was nothing to let him know that his life would be changed. It was only in retrospect that the meeting took on a certain corona, a halo of light that made it feel warm and bright in his memory archives. 

Ignis was stepping back from a lick of flame underneath the pan he was preparing a sauce in. He stepped back, and collided with someone else, someone carrying an armload of dirty dishes and moving much too quickly through the small galley kitchen Ignis had to work with. 

The other person, a droid he didn’t recognize, swayed on the spot for a moment, his burden shifting loudly. Ignis turned and grabbed him by the arms, and together, they managed to keep themselves upright and the dishes off the floor. 

The other droid emitted a warbling, apologetic chime. “Sorry about that. All good?”

Ignis released him, realizing they’d lingered longer than was necessary. “You need to announce when you’re moving behind someone in here,” he said, turning quickly back to the sauce on the stove. “And don’t put those dishes there. They go in the scullery sink in the back.” 

“You got it, Chief.” The new droid responded, heading back in the other direction. 

Ignis removed the pan from the heat and stared after him for a moment. He had been pale, blue-eyed, and a little more small and compact than Ignis himself. He wore a plain black janitorial uniform—perhaps only a temporary assignment to this kitchen. He looked unusual, but not entirely unfamiliar.

It wasn’t until a few days later, when their shifts happened to line up again, that they were able to exchange more than a few words.

“You off, too, Chief?” Prompto asked as they met at the handwashing station to clean up.

“I am, yes,” Ignis replied, untying his apron. He paused before pulling it over his head. “Why do you call me that?” 

Prompto blinked at him. “I thought…” He leaned in and squinted at the embroidery on Ignis’s apron, which said ‘_Chef/Service,_’ then groaned. “My visual processing is kind of screwy, dude. Sorry. So, what do I call you?”

“Ignis is fine.” 

The droid stuck out his hand. “They call me Prompto.” 

“Nice to meet you.” They shook hands, and Ignis finished depositing his apron into the laundry chute. 

As they exited into the hallway, Prompto told Ignis that he’d only recently been integrated into the crew of Lucis, and was being tested out in various roles throughout the station. “Maybe they’ll ask you to evaluate me for a permanent post,” he concluded.

Ignis hummed. “Perhaps. Typically, management duties like that are reserved for humans, however.” 

“Oh, right,” Prompto replied, untroubled.

“I’ve also had some trouble calibrating my eyes,” Ignis said, still dwelling on the beginning of their exchange. “Have you considered using correctional lenses?” 

“Oh, so that’s not just for the aesthetic?”

“What do you mean by that?” 

“I mean,” Prompto said, gesturing at his own face. “You look so cool.”

Ignis pushed his glasses up his nose instead of replying, unsure if he should take that as a compliment. 

“Anyway,” Prompto continued, “I don’t think something like that would help. It’s more of a software problem. I guess you pick up a bug or two when you get wiped so many times. Plus, the humans might start thinking I’m smart or something if I go around wearing glasses.” 

Ignis was on the point of asking Prompto to elaborate—why had he been so often reprogrammed?—but Prompto stopped at an intersection of corridors and held up a hand in farewell.

“Well, see ya,” he said, and Prompto set off before Ignis could even respond with a proper goodbye. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some more detail on the content warnings listed in the tags:  
-Sexual Content is between two androids and doesn't involve any human-shaped private parts  
-Minor Character Death: less than canon (Luna does NOT die in this fic)  
-Body Horror: cybernetic modifications (both voluntary and forced), removable body parts  
-Mild Psychological Horror: brainwashing, kidnapping
> 
> As always, you can contact me directly on twitter (jump_soap), discord (jumpsoap#8845) or gmail (jumpsoap) if you would like more information about the content of this story before you read it (or just to chat!).


	3. Chapter 3

_He kept reaching for something, lifting a hand to his face. The other droids that were working on him didn’t like that. They were changing his programming and his hardware, uploading code and tearing out his radio receiver to install a new one. It made him feel like he was malfunctioning. Something in the code blocked his internal diagnostics from resolving the problem, and when he fidgeted they held him down or forced him to power down. _

_The feeling that he belonged elsewhere grew no less insistent. It was as though an insect had crawled under his skin, trapped somewhere in his circuitry._

_He laid still and ignored the buzzing inside of him until it ached. _

Ignis was roused by a nudge and a comment.

“Holy shit,” someone was saying. “Is this Ignis?”

“Your old caretaker, huh?” another voice said with a grunt. “Looks like they got him pretty bad.”

“Those bastards!” the first voice said. “They took everything from us.”

“I have not been destroyed,” Ignis said, diverting his attention away from the continuing data transfer enough to lift his face toward the voice he recognized as a human named Noctis.

The young man yelped in surprise, and his companion chuckled dryly.

Noctis knelt down beside him. “Scared the crap out of me,” he muttered, but gripped Ignis’s shoulder as though checking to see if he was really there.

“I am glad that you are unharmed,” Ignis said to him. “And… I am grieved to learn of your father’s fate.”

The attack, he had learned from the database, had been as swift and efficient as butchering an animal. More like a strike force flooding a civilian compound than a military assault on a rival base. 

It had only been so successful by treachery: an elite Lucian officer, trusted far beyond what he merited, had provided Niflheim with everything they needed to bring a ship to the base undetected and dock at a rarely-trafficked hangar on the central level. 

A regiment of battle droids had swept through the base, blasting through doors and walls, destroying machinery and people and droids without mercy or hesitation as they stormed the bridge and finally cut down Lucis’s commander and head navigator, Regis Lucis Caelum.

“Yeah,” Noctis said, pulling his hand back and standing up. “Me and Gladio are gonna go do something about that.”

“You better clear out of here,” Gladiolus said. Ignis knew him mostly by reputation, a human friend of Noctis. Skilled with both machinery and people, and physically strong enough to easily lift and carry Noctis when his implants malfunctioned or the tasks of navigation overwhelmed him. “Don’t wanna get exhaust in your head hole, there. You and Noct can catch up when we get back.”

“You’re going?” Ignis said, scrambling to his feet, more steady now that he had charged. “Where?”

Gladio scoffed at the question, but Noctis answered, voice tight with fury, “Gonna run them down. They think they’re getting away with this.” 

Cindy called to them, coming closer. “Alright, boys, I got the Regalia warming up. She’s a little banged up, but there’s nothin’ else that’ll get you there like she can.” 

Ignis disconnected and pulled the cables out from his chest. “When do we go? Now?”

There was a silence.

“You want to come with us?” Noctis asked eventually. “What, for revenge?”

Ignis turned his face away, not answering that.

“We have to go now. How long ‘til he can get new eyes?” Gladio asked, talking about Ignis as though he wasn’t there.

“In case y’all hadn’t noticed, I work on ships. You’ll wanna call up someone in droid maintenance.”

“An educated guess, Cin.”

“If they got spares already, it shouldn’t—” 

“It doesn’t matter,” Ignis interrupted.

“What?”

“I’m not getting replacements. No one is touching my visual processing system.”

Gladio growled, “We can’t take half a droid to attack a Niflheim starship. You wanna come, you’re getting new eyes.”

“Absolutely not. I know my rights and I don’t have to submit to unwanted modifications.”

“Fine. But that doesn’t mean you got the right to come on this mission.” 

Ignis calmed himself. Gladiolus was, surely, as capable of reason as any human. “I believe I can be of more use without the replacements.” He could practically feel Cindy and Noctis staring as they argued. “When the Niflheim force came through, they took a part of me with them. Hours ago, transmission of visual data from that part to myself resumed. An attempt to install new eyes could sever the connection.”

“You don’t want revenge,” Noctis said. “You want to get your missing piece back.”

Ignis inclined his head.

“It’s too risky,” Gladiolus insisted.

They fell silent, shoes scraping the ground, clothes rustling. The two humans had moved away to converse in low voices.

“_You said you were with me,” _Noctis was hissing.

“_Damn it, Noct,” _Gladio responded, “_I’m with you. I’m always gonna be with you. But this is already a suicide mission. You get that, right?”_

“_So how’s he gonna make it worse?”_

A grudging laugh. 

“They took something from all of us,” Noctis said, no longer whispering. “At least he has a chance of getting back what he lost.”

Gladio had no further argument. “Fine. Come get yourself killed, too.” 

The ship was small, barely larger than an escape pod. But she was fast, Cindy assured them, and the only ship in the hangar equipped for stealth. 

Noctis climbed aboard to sit at the helm and acquaint himself with the controls and the route while Gladio hauled cases of supplies on board.

Ignis lingered in the hangar. Through his feet he felt the steady thrum of the enormous starbase. His hand rested on the interceptor craft, which was shuddering as Gladio stomped up and down her ramp.

Before Ignis boarded, Cindy pressed a bundle into his hands: a change of clothing wrapped around a rigid case. He slid a hand inside and felt the contours of a personal repair kit.

“They really took him, huh?” she asked.

Ignis nodded jerkily. “They won’t keep him,” he promised.

“You try not to come back in any more pieces,” she said, poking him in the chest.

“Thank you,” he said, grasping her hand for a moment before making his way up the ramp and into the ship. 

Ignis knew the dimensions and layout of this class of ship, but he still wasn’t accustomed to not being able to use his eyes. Leaving the familiarity of the starbase would be a challenge.

He heard Noctis talking to himself, or talking to the ship. The tasks of navigation could not be performed by a droid, so Ignis wasn’t sure what exactly they entailed. Navigation required something that a positronic brain and a constructed body could not provide. However, neither could a normal human withstand the mental or physical strain that the job entailed. 

Navigators were raised from birth for the role, selected from promising bloodlines and groomed and trained and modified until they could intuitively perform the arcane calculations needed to direct a vessel through hyperspace. 

It wasn’t a pretty process, either. Noctis’s voice ceased and the ship began to move, taxiing to the bay doors, and in the relative quiet Ignis could hear the clicks of Noctis’s cybernetic hands, spread over the controls like an upended bucket of rats.

Ignis stripped himself of the ruined clothing he had been wearing the day of the attack on Lucis, and pulled on the jumpsuit Cindy had given him. It was stiff and heavy, the uniform of a droid that worked with heavy machinery and danger. It made him feel anonymous and (he hoped!) strong. 

On a bench out of Gladio’s way, he sat and weighed the personal repair kit in his hands. Cracking the case open, he found a length of plastic tape. He carefully wound the tape around his head, covering his damaged eye sockets. As Gladio had said, dust could cause further damage if it found its way inside. 

He had sustained further damage, but it was primarily cosmetic. He wouldn’t waste the supplies trying to repair that. He might need them later, and not for himself. Ignis wrapped his ruined clothing around the case and stored it beneath the bench.

Elsewhere, his other eye saw nothing once again, its vessel not currently active. Stored somewhere he didn’t belong. They wouldn’t keep him.

Ignis strapped himself in and cast his thoughts elsewhere, limiting his sensory intake so that he wouldn’t try to pick at the tape that was wrapped tightly around his head.

… 

Regis had been a good man. His leadership had established Starbase Lucis as a bastion of peace and order in the galaxy. 

Ignis still remembered the first time he had met the commander and his young son. It was one of his earliest memories.

“How do you feel today?” Regis had asked him kindly. Ignis had taken note of the cybernetic replacements and enhancements patched over his body, evidence of a life as a navigator as well as a warrior. “Fully functional, I hope.” 

“Never better,” Ignis responded, which caused the man to smile. This was his first day of feeling anything, after all.

Regis jostled the boy in his arms, and the boy looked up at Ignis, shy and unsure. “This is Ignis. He—” Regis stopped, and looked to Ignis. “It is ‘he,’ isn’t it?”

“That is acceptable.” 

“Do let us know if that changes,” Regis said, and continued to explain to his son that Ignis would be caring for him and preparing him for his future as a navigator and commander, like his father. 

Unaware of the dangers and toils that future promised him, the boy had smiled up at Ignis and taken his hand in two small palms. 

Ignis had been created to care for Noctis as a child; once he was a man, Ignis was without a purpose. Noctis had been sent to train and study on planets and ships affiliated with Lucis, and Ignis had been shuffled around the station to find a way to earn his keep there.

He hadn’t worried about it, and indeed, he had quickly found a place in the kitchens. He had a knack for the balance of precision and spontaneity that cooking required, and although he would never consume the food he made, it pleased him to create it to specifications and lay it out like something beautiful. 

It took Prompto longer to find a place to settle in. He lasted only a few days in the kitchens. It turned out he leaned far more toward ‘spontaneity’ than ‘precision.’ He couldn’t be taught to cook. And the cycles of chaos and boredom clearly stressed him. No matter how many times it happened, the clatter of used trays falling to the bottom of their chute always left him tense and wary. 

“Guess I’m no good here, either,” Prompto said on his last trial day in the kitchens, looking at his apron in his hands for a moment before dropping it down the laundry chute.

“Come now, you haven’t even gotten your evaluation yet,” Ignis reassured him. They lingered, there, in the narrow atrium between the kitchen, now quiet and dark, and the corridor outside. 

Prompto laughed at him. “I think you’re just gonna miss me, Chief.” 

While Ignis wouldn’t miss the dropped dishes and burnt food, he did find himself processing an unexpected melancholy. “What will you try next? Security, perhaps?” Energetic and perceptive, Prompto could be well suited to such a role.

But Prompto quickly responded, “No.” Then he backtracked, seeming contrite at the harshness of his own voice. “I don’t have to do that if I don’t want to, right? They said I didn’t have to.”

“You certainly don’t,” Ignis agreed, surprised. 

Prompto rubbed at his chest, where his ports would be covered, as though a loose wire was niggling at him. “I hope not. There’s gotta be something else I’m good at, right?” 

“You’re a pacifist?” Ignis guessed.

“Just squeamish,” Prompto said, leaning back against the wall, hands still on himself. “You know, I used to… I don’t really like to think about it.”

“Used to what?” Ignis pressed, too interested to let that pass.

“Used to be with them,” Prompto said, looking down at his feet, tapping his heel against the floor. “The Niffs.” 

“Like Cindy,” Ignis said, suddenly realized why Prompto looked familiar. He hadn’t recognized him as a Niflheim droid. It had been so long since he had bent his attention toward anything happening outside of the walls of their base. 

Prompto laughed, posture finally relaxing. “From Engineering? I guess. I wish.” 

“She defected some time ago,” Ignis allowed. “You may be different models.”

Prompto shrugged. “She defected on purpose. I just got my processor fried and got scooped up with the trash. Plus, she’s, you know, Cindy. She’s so pretty.” He said it with a sigh of his coolant system, as though the thought tempted him to power down and dream.

“But you look the same,” Ignis pointed out.

That made Prompto straighten up, his fans whirring back to life audibly. “That’s not true.”

“Do you want cosmetic modifications like that?” Ignis asked him.

Prompto shook his head. “I just wanna do something useful,” he said, looking right at Ignis, blue eyes wide and vulnerable. Cindy had never looked at him like that. “So I don’t have to fight.”


	4. Chapter 4

“How long till we meet up with your, uh, contact?” Gladiolus asked Noctis at the front of the ship.

Ignis was still strapped in at the back, reviewing the footage he had recorded from his other eye, examining every second of it for some kind of insight that could help him. He’d never been so far from Lucis, and never felt so useless.

They were cruising, now, between warp points, and Noctis let out a long, weary sigh. “Dunno,” he said. “I haven’t heard back.” 

“Aren’t we going after the Niflheim ship?” Ignis asked, unstrapping himself and standing up.

“Yeah, yeah,” Noctis said. “But first I just need to… I’m gonna start up the beacon again.”

“Are you sure that’s wise?” Ignis asked, the recent updates to strategy and combat systems giving him a new and urgent sense of alarm at the idea. 

“It’s fine. We’re about to make another warp, so even if someone intercepts us they won’t get here in time to cause a problem.” Noctis’s cybernetic fingers were already clicking against the control panel, entering the precise path of the next warp. 

“Unless—” Ignis started, but the floor lurched under his feet, and he fell to his knees. _Unless they’re already nearby._

“Hey, what’s wrong with you?” Gladiolus asked, but was interrupted by Noctis, who cursed loudly. “Noct! What happened? Your hands…” Particles of burnt hair and plastic turned the air acrid. 

“I-I don’t know,” Noctis said. “An EMP blast—I think? But I can’t reboot the instruments, they’re going crazy. There’s a ship out there—No, there’s two—” As he spoke, a shrill tone drowned out his voice in Ignis’s microphones.

Ignis tried to cover his ears, clutching in vain at the smooth floor. His gyroscope was going wild, as though the _Regalia _was bucking and spinning, falling.

Strong arms hauled him back into his seat and strapped him in. Ignis grabbed at Gladio’s arm and spoke as well as he could through the screaming tone, “_There’s some kind of jammer_.” 

He was trying to counteract the tone within his own mind, identifying the pattern of changing frequencies to block it out, but it was complicated and he wasn’t made for this. 

Gladio pulled away; if he said anything, Ignis couldn’t hear it. All Ignis could perceive was his heavy footfalls rattling the flooring. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, couldn’t even stand. 

He diverted everything he could to identifying and cancelling the jamming signal. The ship was undoubtedly subject to the same attack, and the ship was far more important than himself. If it was having half as much of an effect on the Regalia as it was on Ignis, they wouldn’t be unable to move through space at all, let alone warp. Every second that went by surely brought them closer to obliteration at the hands of whatever force was sending the signal.

There was a flash of light in his eye, and he flinched. He was momentarily stunned while his system created a record in his accident data recorder, so that the circumstances of his imminent destruction would be known to anyone able to salvage it.

But nothing had happened on the _Regalia_. He was so ready for an explosion or a breach that he had forgotten for a moment that his own eyes saw nothing. 

He saw a corridor, bright lights above, black floors below. Other droids. Cameras and monitoring devices. A screen displaying several waveform charts, gradually synching up. A rack of weapons. 

_He needed to be evaluated. He was out of place, here; among ranks of droids that looked and acted the same way he did, he still stood out. _

_They brought him to a large room and put a gun in his hands. He was slow, raising it to the target. He didn’t want to fail, but he didn’t want to do this, either._

_Programming that didn’t originate in his own mind coursed through his circuits. He pulled the trigger._

Ignis sagged against his restraints, feeling as though he’d just collided with a solid wall. The maelstrom of the jammer had ceased as suddenly as it had come upon him. His countermeasures lurched to a halt, as well. They’d been no use. His internal clock told him he’d been distracted for several minutes; crucial time during which anything could have happened.

He could hear again, and chaos filled the _Regalia_. Gladio and Noctis were shouting, a siren was blaring, and Ignis could detect the oxygen and pressure inside the cabin dropping rapidly. The ship shuddered from an impact as Ignis freed himself and struggled to his feet to stagger toward the front of the ship.

His electromagnetic sensor, having rebooted after the EMP, was tingling from a nearby radio transmission, but it took him a moment to focus on the frequency. 

“Someone’s boarding,” Noctis said, voice filtered through a breathing mask. “My coms are still fried. Get ready.” 

“Right,” Gladio said, and Ignis heard the whirring of a handheld canon charging up. 

“Hold your fire,” Ignis said, throwing a hand up in their direction. He had found the frequency of the transmission, and decoded the message. “They have a Lucian call sign.” 

The humans made no sound of acknowledgement, but the canon shut off. Someone took Ignis’s hand, pulling him to stand in line with the others. Noctis. He squeezed Ignis’s hand; through their joined palms, Ignis could feel that his blood pressure and pulse were elevated, blood oxygen level reduced. There was damage to the cybernetic parts on the tips of the navigator’s fingers, the pseudo-digits twisted and exposed where they should have been retracted beneath false skin. Ignis squeezed back.

They waited in tense silence as the breached hull of the _Regalia_ leaked into space and the intruders pried open the ship’s broken hatch.

“Everyone freeze!” They stormed in, two or three of them, hard footfalls making the metal flooring sound flimsy under their feet. The woman who was shouting spoke with the authority of someone well-armed. 

Another one of them spoke before any of the _Regalia _crew could defend themselves. “Hold up, Crowe,” he said. “That’s Regis’s kid. It really is him.” 

Gladio had moved to stand between the intruders and where Noctis and Ignis were boxed in against the control panel. “You know these people, Noct?”

“N-no,” Noctis said, breath coming fast and shallow. 

“Son of a fuckin’ black hole,” the woman named Crowe muttered. “Alright, you kids get on the _Trident_. We’ll pull this piece of junk in.” 

There was a click of static, as of a communicator being activated. “Prepare for cargo and passengers, Luna,” the man said. “You were right, it’s your boyfriend.” 

“Luna?” Noctis tore his hand away from Ignis, stepping forward, but not before Ignis sensed a sharp spike in his vital signs. 

“Noct, watch it—” Gladio said, then grunted.

Ignis crouched and reached for Noctis, hand landing on his shoulder. He had collapsed, but Gladio was holding him up.

“Do we go with them?” Ignis asked quietly, leaning forward with the pretense of checking more carefully on Noctis.

“Better than suffocating,” Gladio muttered back. “This ship is done for.”

“Can you carry him?” the man asked.

“That’s my job,” Gladio responded.

Crowe turned her voice toward Ignis. “Alright, then you— What happened to you?” 

“My optical input devices have been damaged,” Ignis responded. 

“Why do you have a blind droid with you?” she asked.

“Above my pay grade,” Gladio responded, voice strained as he hefted Noctis up. 

“He can still carry crap,” the man said. 

“You said they had a Lucian call sign, right?” Gladio murmured. “This could be who Noct was trying to link up with. Maybe his beacon wasn’t only good for getting our asses kicked.”

They loaded the essential pieces of equipment and luggage into Ignis’s arms, Gladio directing as well as he could with his arms full of navigator. The strangers led them through the vestibule that was temporarily binding the _Regalia_ to the larger ship. As they crossed through the walkway, Ignis felt a dip at the border between the two ships’ gravity fields. 

“Welcome to the _Trident_,” the man who had boarded their ship said once they were inside. He had removed his helmet, and his voice was clear and strong. “I’m Nyx, this is Crowe. I told you to quit it with the guns, Crowe.” 

The woman huffed, but Ignis heard her guns holstered. Nyx directed Gladio to lay Noctis down, and Nyx took Ignis’s arm and led him deeper into the ship, Crowe a few paces behind them.

“Set it down here,” Nyx told him once they had passed through several doors. “What’s your function?”

It took a moment for Ignis to answer. What was his function? He hadn’t come on this mission for the benefit of any human. Was he still a chef? “Personal care,” he decided.

“Right. We’re not equipped to fix your damage here, but maybe you can interface with the _Trident_ for us once you’re up to speed.”

“Are you in charge of this vessel?” Ignis asked.

“No,” Nyx said. “Crowe, take him back to the main cabin. He can, I dunno, care for the Noctis kid, or something. I gotta make sure their ship isn’t going to roll away in cargo.”

She towed Ignis back through the ship, and he began to establish a rough map of this new ship in his mind. It didn’t feel entirely unfamiliar. Ignis was relieved to hear Noctis and Gladio speaking as he and Crowe returned to the main cabin.

There was a third person there, as well, and they whistled as Ignis joined his two companions.

“Are you alright?” Ignis asked Noctis and Gladio, ignoring the other person for the moment.

“We’re fine,” Noctis said, taking his hand again. Indeed, his vital signs already seemed improved.

“You really did go through the wringer, huh?” The other person said. He took Ignis’s other hand and shook it firmly. “Libertus. We’ve seen worse, I’ll tell you that, but not much worse. Kinda makes my bum leg look like a scratch, I gotta say.”

Crowe snorted. “All your bum leg does is get you out of EVAs, Lib.”

“Where’s Luna?” Noctis demanded, interrupting their banter.

“She’s plotting our warp,” Crowe said. “Keep it in your suit. Oh, and there’s our sign. Strap in, everyone. We gotta get out of here before anyone else picks up that beacon you sent out.”

“She’s navigating?” Noctis asked.

“Doing her best,” Libertus said.

Ignis once more pulled safety restraints into place over his body on an unfamiliar ship, just as uncertain and distant from his goal as he ever had been. He leaned back as the spacecraft jerked, and delved into his past again.

… 

“You’re doing your best,” Ignis had told Prompto, in a time and place that he would never be able to return to except in memories. 

He had pulled Prompto into an enclave off of a main corridor, a nook that hid charging cables and a spill response station. They had simply been talking, but then Prompto had started to tremble.

As they stood in the enclave, Prompto was scrubbing a hand over his eyes, lubricant seeping from the miniscule orifices beside his eyes as though his systems were trying to flush out debris from the lenses. It was a minor malfunction he seemed to be prone to when agitated. 

“I can’t do anything right,” Prompto whispered, voice staticky. “I’m only good at shooting. I c-can’t go back to that.”

“How could you remember that?” Ignis asked him, wishing he could do something, anything, himself to erase the trauma contorting Prompto’s face. “I thought you were completely reformatted.”

Prompto clutched at his own chest, twisting the fabric, but he nodded slowly. “I was. I can’t… remember. But I can still feel it. I’m still afraid.” 

Ignis reached out and cupped Prompto’s face, brushing the liquid away and turning his face up so that their gazes met. He studied the flecks of old damage on Prompto’s face, the curve of his nose, the way his eyes shimmered with moisture as he looked back with uncertainty and distress. 

“You’re safe here. You don’t have to prove yourself. I think… Prompto, I think you’re perfect,” Ignis said, and then he kissed Prompto.

Prompto’s eyes fell shut as he wrapped his arms around Ignis’s shoulders and pulled him close. Ignis, too, let his eyes close and became lost in the quiet comfort of their bodies and mouths pressed together.

It had been so easy to kiss him, so easy to hold him in his arms. On Lucis, everything had a place. Ignis had thought that his place had been at Noctis’s side, and then later, that it had been in the kitchen. He had been wrong. His place had always been with Prompto: holding him, kissing him. Cherishing him.

Flying through space on an unknown ship with a crew of strangers, Ignis’s felt cold, and lost.


	5. Chapter 5

_He looked at his own face in the mirrored wall across the narrow space in which he stood beside other droids, waiting for orders. He was ragged, shabby beside the other droids. Pockmarks and patches in his skin, damage new and old, none of which he knew the provenance of. And one green eye, bright and attentive despite seeing nothing at all. _

_It seemed to watch him, and he looked back at it, wondering._

Droids were not created to love. Neither were humans. But a being that can think, and feel, and care, and desire, can also find itself loving, even falling in love, from time to time. The border between care and love had seemed something fuzzy and unreal to Ignis, until suddenly it didn’t.

Falling in love with Prompto hadn’t felt like a gradual progression. It felt as though the moments that had passed between them had gathered into a surge of potential energy until, in a moment, a switch was flipped. 

For so long he had simply been himself, a single individual who had recently begun to enjoy Prompto’s company. In the space of a second he was changed. Something inside of him had opened up in Prompto’s shape, a void that was filled in the same moment it was made.

Ignis had felt affection, loyalty, care before. Regis Lucis Caelum and his son, Noctis, the reason Ignis had been built, had both always held his loyalty and affection. There were others, as well, humans and droids on the base for whom he cared. This was different. In quiet moments of fancy, Ignis wondered if, indeed, the love he felt for Prompto was different from what any other thinking being had ever experienced.

Standing in the main cabin of the _Trident_ as Noctis reunited with his friend Lunafreya, Ignis felt impatience and fear sour any vicarious joy he might have felt. He was absolutely certain, in that moment, that neither of the young navigators had—or would—ever experienced love of the kind he felt for Prompto.

“Luna,” Noctis was saying in a breath as they embraced. “I thought— I was worried—” 

“I’m perfectly fine,” Lunafreya assured him. “Your father’s guard has kept me in the best of care.”

“You say that like you haven’t been the one keeping all our asses alive,” Nyx said.

“We’ve been fugitives for some time,” Luna said.

“You…” Noctis said, voice choked with emotion. “You haven’t been writing. I thought they caught up with you.” 

“Oh, Noctis,” Luna said. “Of course you were worried. The journal was destroyed shortly after we left Tenebrae.” 

Lunafreya, Ignis was able to gather, had spent many years trapped on Tenebrae, an inhabited moon. The entire star system had fallen under the dominion of the Niflheim Empire in a strike nearly as swift as the attack on Lucis had been. The ship they currently traveled on, the _Trident_, and the accompanying crew of Nyx, Crowe and Libertus, had been dispatched clandestinely from Lucis years ago to spy and skirmish at the edges of the system. 

The _Trident_ had come into contact with rebels on Tenebrae and eventually succeeded in extracting Lunafreya less than a quarter-year ago. They had been on the run ever since. 

Longtime friends, Lunafreya and Noctis had maintained contact even while Luna was incarcerated by means of a pair of tablets that were joined together by quantum entanglement. Whatever was inscribed on one tablet appeared instantaneously on the other, no matter the distance. 

It was the same technology that allowed Ignis to maintain a connection to his missing eye. He touched his face, fingertips tracing the contours of the tape where he could almost feel a phantom of the eye. He could see a face, reflected, waiting… Some of his resentment ebbed away in the face of Noctis’s palpable relief.

“What are you doing out here, and on such a small vessel?” Luna asked Noctis. “I recognized your beacon, but I could hardly believe it.”

“You haven’t heard,” Gladio said. “The Niffs got us. Cut down the commander, grounded a ton of ships. Gave us Hell.”

Several people spoke at once: Crowe, cursing the Empire; Libertus, expressing disbelief; Nyx, sitting down heavily and asking how it happened.

“I’m so sorry, Noctis,” Luna said, her steady voice cutting through them all. “But why are you here? What is your mission?” 

“Gonna give the bastards a taste of their own medicine,” Noctis said fiercely. “We can still catch up to the ship that struck us. I can get us there.” 

Luna took a breath and sighed. “You must not do this thing.” 

“What?”

“If Lucis has truly taken such a blow and lost its commander, what it needs is not a wandering knight meting out violence for violence. It needs a new king. It needs you.”

“I can’t be the commander of Lucis,” Noctis objected.

“I’m with you, Luna,” Nyx said. “We have to go back.”

“No one asked you,” Noctis said. “If you wanted to come back to Lucis, you should have brought Luna back right away.” Nyx tried to reply, but Noctis barrelled on, “What have you even been doing out here?”

“What did you say to me?”

“You said you were out here to spy,” Noctis said. “You didn’t do jack! If you were sent out here by my dad, you should have been able to—”

“We have been running ourselves ragged trying to—”

Ignis listened to them fight and knew that Noctis’s will was eroding. Noctis’s anger was reflexive and hot. It would burn out quickly and leave him ashamed and acquiescent. He had found his friend; he wasn’t desperate anymore. Ignis turned and left the room, hand on the wall to keep his steps straight. 

“Hey, where’s he going?” Libertus asked behind him.

A hand caught his elbow and turned him around. “What are you doing?” Noctis asked. His voice was still hard from arguing with Nyx.

“If you will not chase the Niflheim ship, then I will do it on my own,” Ignis said. 

He would find the _Regalia_, do what he could to repair her damage. If it was mainly the life support systems that had been damaged by the Niflheim scout, that wouldn’t matter to him. 

“What are you saying?” Noctis asked, but the fight had gone out of his voice, as Ignis had known it would. “They’re… they’re right, you know. This was stupid. We can do more good back on Lucis.” 

“I have to get to that ship.” 

Noctis dropped his hand from Ignis’s elbow. “Why? Just for an eye?” 

“Not for that,” Ignis said, voice coming out unsteady. He didn’t want to say the truth. Speaking it aloud made it feel both awfully real and strangely abstract. “There’s someone there. I promised I would do everything I could to keep him safe.” 

“A human?”

“A droid.”

Noctis took a deep breath. “You really care about him?”

“I love him. I gave him a part of myself. I gave him everything. I can’t go back to Lucis.” Ignis was pleading, now. “I can’t stay here and do nothing. They’ll make him fight their battles until he’s destroyed.”

“Don’t go off on your own,” Noctis said. “I’ll talk to the others.” 

“Noctis…” Ignis started.

“If I’m gonna be the new commander of Lucis, I’m not going to start off letting one of my people—two of them—down. I said we would get you back what you lost. I mean it, Ignis. We’ll save him.” 

… 

“Do you think we have souls like humans do?”

The question seemed to come from nowhere, but Ignis had learned that this wasn’t so uncommon with Prompto. His attention fluctuated from the current moment to abstract observations at a wild rate. Ignis was learning to keep up.

They were spending time in one of the observation decks of the starbase, looking out at open space. The star whose system Lucis currently occupied was dim and red. Ignis watched flares curling off of it. Prompto was at work sorting through a bin of broken and damaged machinery he had dragged up here, and he’d begged Ignis to come keep him company.

He hadn’t needed to beg, of course, but Ignis enjoyed his dramatics. It was so much better than seeing him despondent. Since they had kissed, Prompto had thrown himself into his search for work with renewed vigor—although he would often track Ignis down and, with a coy smile, ask him for a ‘reminder.’

“I’m not convinced that humans have souls,” Ignis responded. He was watching the stars pass through the towering window before them, enjoying the idle peace of a place that wasn’t the kitchen, for once.

“Huh?” Prompto finished stripping a length of wire of its coating and added it to a growing spool. Ignis was sitting on a bench, looking out the large window into space, but Prompto had shifted and moved until he’d ended up on the floor, surrounded by several piles of components. 

Ignis crossed his legs and looked down at him. He thought of Regis, more machine than man by the time Ignis had been created. Was his biological brain so different from Ignis and Prompto’s positronic ones? “What’s the difference between a being with a soul and one without?” he asked.

Prompto hummed. “Guess I haven’t thought about it.”

“We think, don’t we?” Ignis said. “We have thoughts and memories. We exist, and we’ll die.” 

“But humans were always around, and they made us.” 

“Humans make each other, as well.” 

Prompto made a noise of triumph as he pried a fuse from a charred casing. He held it up to the light. “Now that’s a beautiful sight. They said this probe crashed into an asteroid, can you believe it? It’s not all scrap, even after that.” 

“A marvel of engineering,” Ignis agreed, not looking at the fuse.


	6. Chapter 6

“The _Leviathan_,” Lunafreya said, as they all gathered around a screen at the aft of the ship. Ignis was connected to a port beside the screen so that he could display the footage he’d recorded from his captured eye. Cables dangled from his chest, his borrowed jumpsuit loose around his shoulders.

“It’s not simply a battleship,” Luna continued. “It’s one of six greatships that we believe Niflheim has been using to strike at locations outside of their dominion, to expand their reach. There are many details we still do not know about these ships that could make an assault on the _Leviathan_ difficult and dangerous.”

Lunafreya had maps, sketched out by hand; star charts tracking sightings of the greatships; photographs and recordings of their known attacks. Some of the footage was horribly similar to Ignis’s scattered memories of the assault on Lucis. Although he could view these through his connection to the terminal, he kept his attention away from the footage.

“Most significantly, our intelligence has been unable to determine how the greatships are able to travel as far and as quickly as they do, given the limitations of navigating with such large vessels and the Empire’s feud with the School of Navigation.”

“Ignis, you had an idea, right?” Noctis prompted. He’d been true to his word, turning back to the crew of the _Trident_, with whom he’d just argued bitterly, to calmly advocate for a mission on Ignis’s behalf.

“That’s correct,” Ignis said, playing for them a selection clips he had recorded: The pristine halls of the _Leviathan_, the other droids, the cameras and monitors. “I believe there is no biological life aboard the _Leviathan_.” 

“Huh,” Libertus said. “Just droids?” 

“It’s something we had wondered,” Lunafreya mused. “With a crew of all droids, the ship can accelerate at a rate that would be lethal to humans, and could even make short, uncharted warps without risking a disruption of life support.”

“Sure, why not?” Gladiolus said. “It would explain how they get around.”

“The Empire isn’t exactly known for recognizing personhood in droids,” Crowe pointed out. “If there’s no humans on the ships, then who’s in charge?”

“No one,” Ignis said. He displayed images of droids moving in tight synchronicity as they attacked; monitors tracking hundreds of individual oscillations; bulky transmission equipment. “My hypothesis is that the droids are being controlled by a non-sapient artificial intelligence, a pre-written code that overrides their own thoughts.”

“Kind of a big leap,” Nyx said, although he didn’t sound entirely dismissive. “That’d be a big stinking security hole.”

“It’s consistent with the information we have on the greatships,” Lunafreya said, voice moving as she stood to examine the images on the screen more closely. “They have a distinctive attack pattern: strike quickly and then completely withdraw. Just what they would do if they had no agents capable of overseeing a long-term occupation, and if they had a great fear of anyone boarding the ships to discover this weakness.”

“They don’t stay in one place long enough for anyone to sneak on,” Gladio summarized. 

“Correct,” Luna said. “Additionally, we have observed that the greatships make frequent trips back to Niflheim central space. We had imagined they were carrying back important cargo pillaged from their targets, but if what Ignis proposes is true, it could well be that the ships are returning to have their programming updated. The Empire would be unlikely to risk sending information so compromising through warp space, and a data package like that would be too complex to send instantaneously.”

“It’s a good lead,” Libertus said, “But we can’t seriously be thinking about attacking one of these things on our own, right? I’m proud as hell of the _Trident_, Luna, but she’s not built for that.” 

“Yes, the fact remains that the _Leviathan_ is a heavily armed battleship with ample defenses to keep anyone from getting inside,” Lunafreya said. “I won’t throw my crew’s lives away. However. If it would allow us to confirm whether the greatships have this weakness, I can offer you limited support in your mission, Noctis. I understand you have… something of a plan.”

“Yeah, well, uh…” Noctis fumbled for words, but he cleared his throat and continued, “We still have time to track down the _Leviathan _based on its last known vector. If you get us within sight of it, I can use the information we got about the layout of the ship from Ignis to warp inside with the _Regalia_.” 

“Stars, kid,” Crowe said. “You really wanna go out with a bang, huh?”

“I can do it,” Noctis said, but a querrelous sound came from Nyx’s direction. “What, you think I can’t?” 

“No, kid, I’m sure you can do whatever you want to,” Nyx said. “Once we fix your hands back up, anyway. Maybe even with them fried, I dunno. But if this thing isn’t made to have humans on it, how are you gonna survive once you’re there?”

“Uh—”

Ignis cut in, “A containment suit will be sufficient if there is indeed no life support. And provided the ship is not accelerating or warping, Noctis will not be adversely affected by its movement.”

“Right,” Nyx said. “Provided all that.”

“Your first task must be to prevent the _Leviathan_ from accelerating or warping in response to being boarded,” Lunafreya said. “Please, Noctis. Nothing has changed regarding your responsibilities to the people of Lucis.”

Noctis huffed, but didn’t argue with her.

“And once we’re in, what then?” Gladio asked. Ignis was surprised that he was including himself in the plan. “We grab this other droid and blow the ship up?”

“I don’t think we should destroy all those droids, if we can avoid it,” Noctis siad. “Especially if they’re the same type as Ignis’s friend.”

“His name is Prompto,” Ignis said. “And he’s my husband.”

“Your husband?” Gladio echoed.

“The love of my life. My reason for being.”

“Okay, fine, I get it. Your husband. And… yeah. Okay. But what are we gonna do, take them all back to Lucis to get reprogrammed?”

“We shouldn’t have to,” Noctis said. “We already know that Niflheim regularly wipe their droids. If they really are using this central programming to relay all their commands, there may not even be aggressive programming local to the individual droids’ memory. If we shut down the central command unit, they’ll just be normal droids capable of surrendering. We can scrub the aggressive orders and, I dunno… hand over control of the ship to the droids, maybe.”

“They wipe them regularly,” Gladio said, and Ignis turned his unseeing eyes to face him, sure that this was addressed to him. “So is your husband even going to know you, if we find him?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ignis said, disconnecting from the display screen. “Prompto was tormented by the knowledge that he had once been made to fight for Niflheim. I won’t let them do that to him again.”

The time that Ignis and Prompto had shared together was mercilessly brief. Measured against the orbits of planets or the voyage of a ship between stars, it was nothing. 

Ignis held those infinitesimal moments in his memory like delicate plants in a grow box. Even while they were together, Ignis realized now that he had always been just the slightest bit on edge, waiting for a calamity just like what had happened.

If Prompto’s mind had been wiped, then all Ignis could do with these memories was cherish them. And swear to keep the promise that they embodied.

… 

“Have you ever done this before?” Ignis asked, guiding Prompto into his room to sit together on his rest platform. 

Prompto’s eyes were a little wide as he shook his head. “Is it safe?”

Ignis set aside the cables he was holding to take his hand. “There’s always some risk in exposing yourself to someone else. I would never endanger you. All I can do is ask for your trust, and promise to make it worthwhile. Do you trust me?” 

“Yeah—yes. Of course I do. And you… Yeah. Let’s do it. I want to.”

“Alright.” Ignis squeezed and then released his hand. “Then what would you like to do? Do you want me to talk you through it on me? Or do you want to experience it yourself first?”

Prompto was looking at him with something like awe on his face. “I think I want to see how it’s done. On you,” he clarified. “Is that… Is it okay?” 

“Absolutely.” 

They had been kissing a great deal over the past several weeks, hands moving over and then under clothing, mapping out by touch what was covered up. Prompto had at first been endearingly inept at all of it, but now, when Ignis drew him forward into a kiss, they melded into each other like two parts of a whole. 

Ignis shrugged off his button-down, then broke away to pull off his shoes, his remaining clothes, and finally his glasses. He took Prompto’s hands and laid them on his own body before moving even closer and meeting his mouth again.

He liked the feeling of Prompto’s fingertips moving over his skin, with purpose, this time, finding the panels that covered his data ports. Prompto stroked over the seams on Ignis’s side, sending a thrill through his body. 

Ignis shifted away again and smiled at Prompto as he joined their hands and guided him to slide the panel open. Prompto’s gaze shifted down to look at him, and Ignis took a moment to study him in turn, his downcast eyelashes, the metallic brackets around his eyes and jaw, his lips parted in exhalation.

“We’ll need to get at your ports as well,” Ignis murmured, touching the hem of Prompto’s shirt. “Do you want to keep your clothing on?”

“No. It’s fine.” Prompto stood to strip off his clothing.

Prompto had sustained more than a little cosmetic damage in his time, most of it in places his clothing would cover. Ignis guessed it must have occurred while he was a combat unit with Niflheim, some combination of battle damage and poor maintenance.

Ignis had already felt much of the scarring with his hands, and instead of making a prolonged examination of any of it, he simply pulled Prompto back onto the platform and handed him the cables. Then, after Prompto had revealed his own ports, he pointed out where to plug them in to set up the link. He watched him unspool the cables and fit the conductors where they needed to go.

“Oh,” Prompto said, looking down at himself once he had plugged everything in. Ignis felt it, too, the little jolt that came with the automated negotiation of communication parameters. 

“I’m ready when you are,” Ignis continued after he went over commands to input and the switch sequence that would reboot him after they ran their course.

“Okay, yeah. And you know how it’s supposed to feel, right? If there’s anything wrong, you’ll tell me to stop?” 

“Of course. It’s going to be fine, Prompto.” 

Ignis closed his eyes as the input began to cloud his senses, sight turning blurred and striped, sound rushing in his ears, every inch of his skin tingling.

“Ignis?” 

“It’s working. Kiss me,” he urged, reaching out for Prompto, pulling him close and feeling Prompto respond through the haze, touching and kissing him with a low sound that harmonized with the sound pouring forth from his own mouth, the vibrations reaching into Ignis’s core.

The sensations became more and more, overwhelming him until—he felt a solid click, and it all stopped. He remained in the quiet dark for several long moments, only feeling the barest comforting pressure of Prompto holding him up, the gentle kinetic sensations of his body being rearranged on the platform, the switches in his abdomen being adjusted.

When his senses returned, the first thing he saw was Prompto’s face hovering over him, brows drawn together above his big blue eyes. He was still nude, his control panel open, though he had unplugged the cables from both of their bodies. “Was that alright?”

“That was wonderful, Prompto,” Ignis said, reaching up a hand to touch his face. “I’m afraid I’ll need a moment before I can reciprocate.” 

Prompto’s look of concern broke into a wide grin. “Was it really? It looked intense. You know, it felt pretty good just to be on the other end. Is it… I mean…” He sat back on his haunches on the platform, brushing the hair back out of his face, looking excited, abashed, adorable.

Ignis sat upright as well, still feeling languid and loose. He swayed forward, nestling his face in the crook of Prompto’s shoulder and speaking softly into his skin. “You’ll see. I’m going to show you just how you make me feel.”


	7. Chapter 7

Ignis did what he could to help Libertus bring the _Regalia_ back into working order as Noctis, Luna and Nyx worked together to track down the _Leviathan_. There was still tension, something crackling in the air between Noctis and Nyx, but it wasn’t for Ignis to intervene as long as they remained focused on the mission. 

Libertus was talkative as they worked, which helped Ignis to keep track of his location in the ship bay, at least. He told Ignis bits and pieces about his travels with Nyx and Crowe before they had rescued Lunafreya, how Regis had dropped them in the middle of space with no way to get back on their own.

“That must have been very frightening,” Ignis said, most of his attention on the _Regalia_’s onboard computer, diagnosing her remaining damage.

Libertus made an ambiguous grunt. “That’s what spies do. Sure was a good day when we met up with Luna, though, I tell you.” He yelped suddenly, and a charred smell filled the air. “Ah, sunspots! Ignis, grab me another roll of insulation, will you? It’d be in dry storage.” 

Ignis stated an affirmative and disconnected from the _Regalia_. He’d quickly gained a working understanding of the _Trident’s_ layout, and made his way through the ship with just his fingertips brushing the wall. 

Dry storage was a spacious closet just off the main living area, with rations and supplies stacked densely on shelves and in cases along the floor. When Ignis hauled the door open, he realized that was not all it contained at this moment. 

The person inside gasped, then cleared his throat. “Uh—” It was Gladio, sounding gruff and strange. “Hey, Ignis.” 

“Hello,” Ignis said. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”

“My fault for creeping around,” Gladio said, and sniffed loudly.

“Are you ill?”

“No.”

“You’ve been weeping,” Ignis said, realizing it. It wasn’t polite to acknowledge such a thing, he knew, but a cruel part of him wanted to call the man out in this moment of weakness. Even if doing so would likely incur his wrath.

But Gladio simply said, “Yeah.”

Whatever bitterness Ignis harbored toward Gladio evaporated instantly; his programming as a caretaker butting in, he thought wryly. “Are you grieving for your father?” he asked softly.

Another sniff. “Yeah. Him. The commander. Everything.” A _whumph _as Gladio sat down heavily on one of the cases. When he spoke again, his voice was fragile and uneven. “I was so _stupid_. I really thought there was no way the Empire could surprise us.”

“Is it your role to make such judgments?” Ignis asked him, taking a step closer. “I was under the impression that your job started and ended with keeping Noctis safe. And you seem to have accomplished that.”

Gladio chuckled wetly. “Still feel like garbage.”

Ignis found his shoulder and laid a hand there. He was still shaking with barely suppressed sobs. “Would you believe me if I said I understand?”

Gladio stood, and Ignis let his hand fall away, stepping back, but Gladio clapped warmly him on the back. “You know?” he said, sounding a more even. “I think I would. Guess I’m not doing much good hiding in here.”

“It’s important for humans to take time to process their feelings,” Ignis said. “If you feel comfortable talking with me, I am here.” 

“What about droids?” Gladio asked.

It took Ignis by surprise. “I beg your pardon?”

“Don’t you need to process your feelings, too? To talk about them?”

Ignis thought of the time just after the attack, the days he had spent unresponsive and disconsolate. “No,” he lied. 

“Good for you,” Gladio said with a more gentle pat to Ignis’s back. He didn’t sound entirely convinced. “Thanks, though. For the offer.” 

Ignis would have normally responded to thanks from a human by saying something like, _that’s what I’m here for_. But, in truth, he wasn’t. Gladio and Noctis were here to help _him_, or at least that was what the situation had developed into. “You’re welcome,” he said instead.

“We’ll get your husband back, Iggy,” Gladio said, as though he could read Ignis’s thoughts on his face. 

The _Regalia_ didn’t need to be in perfect working order, which was good, because Ignis and Libertus were not entirely qualified to repair a spaceship so badly damaged. By the time the others had tracked down the _Leviathan_, the ship could, at the very least, enter warp and come to a stop once she was out. They hoped.

“_We’re approaching visual range of the greatship_,” Crowe said from the LiDAR station at the helm of the _Trident_. Ignis could almost feel it, hurtling through space out there. 

Gladio and Noctis were donning armored containment suits while Ignis held still, trying not to worry at the tape over his eye socket. He had received nothing from his lost eye in hours. 

“The _Leviathan’s_ velocity has held steady,” Lunafreya said to Noctis. “As long as our estimate of your entry point is accurate, you’ll be able to get inside without taking any damage.”

“Thank you, Luna,” Noctis said, and there was a quiet sound of movement, the creaking of Noctis’s suit as they embraced.

“It’s a brave thing you’re doing,” Luna said, speaking quietly and with the strain of someone being held just a little too tightly before they stepped away from each other and she continued, “I pray for your safe return. We will await your signal for as long as we can.” 

“Watch your back in there,” Nyx said, and, curiously, Ignis heard the sounds of a second embrace. 

“Huh. They’re awful chummy all of a sudden,” Gladio remarked to Ignis under his breath.

Perhaps they’d worked out their differences over the course of working together to find the _Leviathan_. However it had happened, it spoke well of Noctis’s ability to command loyalty, and despite the circumstances, Ignis felt a surge of pride for his former charge.

They finished their good-byes and the boarding party climbed into the _Regalia _once again, as they had not too long ago on Lucis. Their mission had changed only slightly, but the shift was nearly palpable: from revenge to rescue, desperation to hope, grief to vigor.

The _Regalia _shuddered as she was released from the _Trident’s_ docking bay. Ignis’s internal hydraulics shifted to account for the change in gravity as they left the larger ship’s field. Neither the artificial gravity nor the standard propulsion engines on their small interceptor were functioning. She would be towed behind the _Trident_, keeping pace with the _Leviathan_ far ahead, until Noctis was able to bring them into warp.

Noctis took a long breath, the sound projected directly into Ignis’s auditory center from the microphone in Noctis’s suit, as he settled into his position. “Any sign we’ve been spotted?”

Ignis straightened up, realizing he was receiving visual input again. An alarm flashing as his eye blinked open, other droids spilling out of open cubbies. 

“_Doesn’t look any different from the outside_,” Crowe was saying over the intercom. “_Best you’re gonna get, I think.”_

“Wait,” Ignis said, and immediately wished he’d stayed silent. But he couldn’t let Noctis and Gladio step into a trap unknowingly. “Prompto. He’s active. They’re all active. Some kind of alarm has been triggered.”

The _Regalia _hummed and shuddered in the tense silence that followed his warning.

“It’s your call, Noct,” Gladio said eventually. “Do we retreat?”

“Any sign they’re trying to lose us?” Noctis asked.

“_They’re holding steady,”_ Crowe reported.

There was a steel to Noctis’s voice that hadn’t been there before when he said, “Prepare to warp.”

Ignis clung to the straps across his chest, taking in all the information he could from what he was seeing. Despite the fear of what they would face once they reached the _Leviathan_, Ignis felt his circuits energized with something like gratitude. 

… 

He remembered one night so clearly, it must have been written into his hardware. From the outside, it would have seemed not so unlike many nights he and Prompto spent together. After their first kiss, they had grown closer at a dizzying rate, falling into a tight orbit around each other.

They sat together on Ignis’s rest platform, Prompto’s head on Ignis’s shoulder, legs tangled together. Ignis was stroking Prompto’s hair while Prompto held Ignis’s other hand, their lips finding each other intermittently.

Ignis hadn’t intended to break the silence for anything, but he found himself speaking. “I read something, a while back,” he said, and Prompto made a soft sound of interest. “A record left by a droid who used to live on this base. Long gone, now…”

“What’d it say?”

Oddly embarrassed, Ignis took a moment before he continued. He buried his fingers in Prompto’s hair, the weft of the fabric soft and thick. “It seems that when two droids are very close,” he said, “There’s a gesture some have made to reify the relationship.”

“Hmm?” Prompto had begun kissing his hand while Ignis thought, his lips buzzing with a gentle current that made Ignis’s skin tingle pleasantly. 

“There’s a way to make an incomplete transfer of components, such that the quantum connections to the original CPU remain intact, for the most part.” Ignis said, still watching Prompto’s yellow hair ripple around his fingers. “The traditional ritual seems to be an exchange of one eye, so that each droid may see from their partner’s perspective.”

Prompto let their joined hands fall to his lap, and drew back to look Ignis in the face. “That sounds kind of permanent,” he said, eyebrows drawn together. “You want to do that with me?”

Ignis realized how badly he wanted it in the same moment that he realized the gravity of the proposal. “Just a curiosity,” he said, looking away. “A passing fancy. Nevermind.”

“With me…” Prompto said again, quieter this time. He laid his head back against Ignis’s shoulder. “You really… Ignis, if you’re asking, if you mean it, I… want to.” 

Ignis wrapped his arms around Prompto, holding him close, feeling the vibrations of his power source and cooling system rumble through his own chest. “There’s no need for us to rush into anything,” he said, burying his face in that soft hair. “But I mean it.”

Ignis wasn’t sure, then, how to put into words everything he felt when he imagined doing this with Prompto. _I’d like nothing more than to be connected to you in that way. I want everyone to know, and I want to think of you constantly, even when we’re apart. I want to see the universe the way you do._

Instead of any of that, he simply said again, “I mean it.”

By any objective measure, they had rushed into it, in the end. After a brief dance of reassurance and insistence on each side, they’d started the paperwork to be approved for a non-standard modification immediately. It was only two days after the night they talked about it.

It was the first decision in Ignis’s existence that he felt absolutely sure of, the first thing that made him feel whole and complete and worthy. A piece he had never known was missing until it was finally installed. 


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special content warning for this chapter: While this was not my intention, there is a scene in this chapter that could be read as a description of an attempted sexual assault, or at least has similar elements to such a scene. It is very short, and I have marked its beginning and end with double asterisks (**), so if you need to skip it just search for that.

Warping while being towed by another ship was not, in general, regarded as a best practice by the School of Navigation. Nor was warping to the interior of another ship. Ignis had come to understand this from the way Noctis and the crew of the _Trident_ spoke about the task, but nothing in their bickering and meaningful silences had told him what the actual experience of such warping would be like. 

On the rare occasions that Regis Lucis Caelum had seen fit to warp the Lucis starbase, it was a production, to be sure. Securing all cargo, strapping down. A lurch that left Ignis’s gyroscope spinning. Warping on the _Regalia _as they left Lucis had been less intense, the little craft dipping and jerking back to a cruising speed.

Now the _Regalia_, her standard propulsion out of commission, trailing after the _Trident_, gave a great shudder, the hull shaking around Ignis as Noctis navigated it through the warp space through inertia alone. 

They came to a halt with a crash that was jarring, but oddly quiet, an impact that threw Ignis sideways in his seat. He heard Gladio groan over their communication link. 

“Ugh… check in, guys,” Nocits said, and Ignis and Gladio both sounded off. “I think that’s it for the _Regalia_.”

“Looks like she got us in,” Gladio said. “What’d you say this room is?”

“Shooting range,” Noctis said.

From the footage Ignis had been able to provide, Luna and Nyx had determined that the cavernous room in which Ignis had watched Prompto’s hands run through exercises and diagnostic processes with guns and other equipment would be the best place to aim the _Regalia_. It was large enough to hold her, and they had been able to calculate its approximate location through the recording and the other intelligence regarding the greatships that the _Trident_ crew had gathered.

Ideally, they would have come to a stop without colliding with any of the walls, preserving the _Regalia_ as an escape option, but they hadn’t been quite so lucky.

“Crowe? Luna?” Noctis was saying, flipping switches. The ambient sounds faded away as the last of the _Regalia’s_ borrowed air drained from her unrepaired hull, leaving Ignis with only what the microphones in the others’ containment suits transferred to his internal audio processors. “Space, it’s completely busted. Can’t even access the com link to the _Trident_.” 

The _Regalia _shifted under their feet.

“What was that?” Gladio said.

“Something moving out there,” Noctis said. “I thought we’d have more time. They’re already here.”

“Get behind me, Iggy,” Gladio said, grunting as he hefted his weapon. “Your husband any of the ones mobbing us right now?”

_He was walking down a corridor, alone save for the alarms flashing all around him, gun gripped tight in his hand. A panicked siren was blaring inside his head—_INTRUDER, INTRUDER, INTRUDER_—and he burned with the rage and fear of it, bent on destroying anything that had invaded the ship._

“No, he’s—somewhere else. I don’t know exactly.”

“Right,” Gladio said, and Ignis’s entire body tingled as Gladio pulled the trigger on the short-range EMP gun that Nyx had armed him with. Even out of its line of fire, Ignis could feel an aura from the pulse. Gladio turned around Ignis and fired several more times through the hull of the _Regalia_, until it seemed that all the droids attempting to break through had been incapacitated.

The three of them all had to heave together to open the bay door at the back of the ship enough to slip out. When they did, Noctis hissed through his teeth.

“Creepy,” he said. “They all look the same.”

“How are we supposed to know which one is yours?” Gladio asked, taking Ignis’s arm to guide him around the droids that had been hit by the EMP. 

“You can recognize Prompto by his one green eye, if nothing else,” Ignis said. 

Gladio jerked Ignis back and fired off another pulse ahead of them. “Not sure how we’re supposed to get close enough to see that,” he muttered once the aura of the pulse had dissipated. “They’re not hesitating.” 

“Ignis, can you figure out where Prompto is?” Noctis asked.

Ignis tried to note every detail he was seeing through Prompto’s eye, tried to compare it to the maps and other footage they had reviewed on the _Trident_. “I think so,” he said.

“You two go find him. See if you can find anything that looks like the control center for the droids. I’m going to shut down the engines.”

“Noct—” Gladio started.

“I can handle it, Gladio,” Noctis interrupted him.

“I know,” Gladio said. “Just— Good luck.”

“We must hurry,” Ignis said. The droids would recover from the EMP sooner or later.

They took off in opposite directions, Noctis running toward the prow of the ship, Ignis and Gladio plunging into the heart of it.

_He was drawn down the corridor, feet moving without needing any input from him. Toward the intrusion, a foreign body inside the ship. The need to purge it was what moved him._

“Anything that _looks like_ the control center,” Gladio was muttering. “Real helpful, Noct. You got any ideas?” He asked Ignis.

“It would have to be a powerful CPU and a strong transponder to manage so many droids even while they are away from the ship,” Ignis said, following along with Gladio’s light touch on his elbow. “We noted several different pieces of large transmission equipment in the recordings I was able to take. They may have been simply boosters, but if we destroy those when we find them, the signal may at least be weakened, buying us some time.”

“Can’t you, you know, hook into the ship, like you did with our ships? Use the cameras, maybe get the real layout?” Gladio suggested, but Ignis grimaced. “Oh. Bad idea?”

“Those were friendly ships that I had all relevant permissions to interface with. The security on a hostile, clandestine vessel such as this one would no doubt be immense and powerful. I’d predict it would cause a complete system failure for myself, at best. At worst, I may be overtaken by the same programming the other droids aboard are following.”

“Yeah, okay, bad idea. Got it.” Gladio sighed. “Can you at least hear the transmission? Detect it, I mean.”

“Oh, yes.” It was scrambled, indecipherable. He’d experienced it once before, during the attack on Lucis, but it was so heavily encoded as to be meaningless without a key and software to interpret it. 

“Where’s it coming from?” Gladio asked eagerly.

“All around.”

Gladio cursed.

Ignis stopped walking, catching Gladio by the shoulder. “We haven’t been accosted since we left the shooting range?” He asked. “None of the droids?”

“Nope,” Gladio said. “It’s like a ghost ship in here.”

Ignis focused inward, watching the ship through Prompto’s eye as he paced down a brightly lit hall. Ignis was struggling to compare the sight to what he knew of the _Leviathan_, his internal sense of place still not functioning at the level it once could. 

“Noctis,” Ignis said, switching his transmission to include Noctis’s channel. “Have you engaged any droids?”

“_Not yet_,” was the reply, just as Noctis’s turned back came into Ignis’s view.

_There_.

Ignis barked a warning even as he set off at a run, back toward the front of the ship. He saw Noctis turn and lift his plasma rifle. “Do not fire on that droid!”

Noctis cursed, but he dodged out of the way of Prompto’s own gunfire, around a corner.

“_He’s firing on me!_” Noctis cried.

Gladio was trying to call Ignis back, but Ignis decreased the volume of his channel.

“Keep searching for the control center,” Ignis told him, sprinting back the way they had just come, tracing his prior footsteps as closely as possible to avoid any obstacles Gladio may have guided him around.

“_Is that Prompto?_” Noctis demanded. 

“Yes!” Ignis stumbled through a doorway, the shooting range opening up around him. 

“_Well get him to stop shooting me!_”**

“I can’t— It’s not—” Ignis tripped, and went sprawling, colliding hard with the ground. Someone grabbed at him, multiple someones, their hands all over him, tearing at his jumpsuit, exposing his abdomen and fumbling at the panels there.

The other droids, having recovered the EMP: he’d run right into their arms. 

“_Ignis?” _

He could see Noctis, still fleeing. He was rolling through an open doorway into a room full of flashing lights and switches, and just starting to haul the doors closed when Prompto lifted his gun and fired at him again. 

Noctis cried out and staggered to the side, out of Ignis’s view. The door was still open. 

Ignis struggled against the droids, kicking at the one that was clawing at his chest, but it was soon back on him, or replaced by another droid. The tape around his eyes finally gave up, sliding off in the struggle and leaving his wounds exposed.

Glado’s voice joined the cacophony of noises and thoughts in Ignis’s head. “_Noct? Iggy?_”

“_I’m fine,_” Noctis panted, not sounding fine at all. “_I’m good. Fucking… Sunspots.”_

“Keep looking for the transmitter!” Ignis ordered Gladio, even as the flaps covering his ports were peeled away and something slotted into him, rasping against his port and clicking into place. He was pinned down by the other droids, unable to do anything but writhe in their grasp and continuously reject the vicious handshake surging through his ports that was trying to pull him in and take him apart from the inside.

“_I found one.” _

The droids froze.

It was only for a moment, but their hands went slack. Their purposeful, coordinated movements stuttered. 

Ignis broke out of their hold and tore the cable out of his chest, distantly registering the damage as part of the port came out with it. He saw Prompto’s open hand, the gun skittering across the ground on his periphery.**

He could still feel the signal all around; its loudest source had been silenced, but there were further beacons on the ship.

“That was just a repeater,” Ignis said as he broke away from the disoriented droids and continued toward Noctis’s location. “Keep looking for the machine that’s creating the signal.”

“_Nice way to say ‘thank you,’” _Gladio grumbled.

Ignis ignored him as he reached the far wall and felt along it, palms slapping against the smooth wall until he found the edge of an open doorway. 

He launched himself through and kept going, closing in on Noctis’s location. 

_A dizzying, yawning moment of blankness, like looking outside during a warp. He’d dropped his gun. Why had he been holding a gun?_

_Then it came crashing back into him—the fear, the rage. The intruder who’d made it to the bridge. He had shot them, but they were still moving around in there, climbing to their feet. _

_And there was another one, something charging down the hall right at him; more importantly, charging right at the bridge._

Ignis stumbled to a stop when he saw himself. Like a screen that had suddenly lost power, the vision he received from his lost eye became a mirror. He saw himself as he had become since the attack on Lucis: face torn open, movements tense and halting, clothes hanging in tatters.

Prompto was there—right there. Only a handful of footsteps away. Ignis spoke his name, but the sound failed to carry through the vacuous air.

He watched himself move closer through the eye that wasn’t his own and almost missed the gun in his periphery, lifting up to aim at him.

Even when he noticed, he couldn't stop himself or turn away.

Something was blurring his vision, fluid clouding the lens.

The gun fired, a streak of light in the grim hallway. Ignis threw up his arms, flinching back, but the shot had gone wide; his view of himself tilted, fell, and went black.

_"Got it!" _Gladio was crowing. "_That oughta calm those droids down. Noct, you still with us?"_

Ignis had fallen to his knees when Prompto blacked out. Now he scrambled across the floor, finding Prompto in a heap, silent and still.

He slid his hands up Prompto's body, finding his face and cradling the familiar shape of it. He rested a thumb on Prompto's eyelid and drew it open to see his own face again, silhouetted against the bright lights overhead.

He saw for just a moment, before the lights shuddered and were extinguished. The utter stillness of space closed in around them as the living energy of the greatship _Leviathan_ drained away.

Prompto's form in his arms was the only thing that remained to Ignis, until Noctis's voice sounded in his head.

"_I'm here. I'm at the helm. We did it."_


	9. Chapter 9

“Why do you call me that?”

It was him: the texture of his voice, the way he asked questions—a hesitation, then a rush of words—the rasp of his hands wringing together. 

“It’s your name,” Ignis said. “Or rather, it was. It can still be yours, if you want it.”

Ignis was looking at himself again. Now, though, they were aboard the _Trident_, sitting across from each other on crates in the cargo bay. The overhead lights were off, the only light coming from safety lights along the floor. The window beside them looked out into open space, dark, the cold surface a mirror reflecting their orange-tinted shapes. 

“Prompto.” It sounded different than it had when Prompto had introduced himself to Ignis, uncertain and slow. “You knew a droid named Prompto, and you took down the _Leviathan_ looking for him.” 

Ignis saw himself nod. “Are you angry that we attacked the _Leviathan_?”

Prompto shook his head, then looked down at his clasped hands. He had a scar on his trigger finger that Libertus had just patched with the repair kit Ignis had carried from Lucis, the dark sealant still curing. “No. It’s good. I think. I didn’t like it.” He glanced up at Ignis, looked away again. “Are you sure it was me?”

“I’m sure,” Ignis said, leaning forward and gesturing at the space in his own head that his eye used to occupy. That same sealant was pasted over the damage across Ignis’s face, giving it a mottled, rough look. “I gave you something of mine. We traded. I’m afraid I wasn’t as careful with yours as you’ve been.”

Now Prompto turned to face the mirror, to look at himself. He touched his face, just below his one green eye. “That’s why it’s not working right.”

Ignis looked at him, taking in the sight of his face. This time, he would be prepared if it was the last time he would ever look upon Prompto again. “Do you remember anything, before the _Leviathan_?” he asked. _Do you remember me? _he thought.

“No.” He looked at Ignis again, another short glance that flickered to his face, then away to the large, dim room, then back again. “Maybe. I don’t know. You can see through it? This eye?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” Prompto asked. “Why did we trade eyes? Does that happen a lot, on Lucis?”

“No.” Ignis turned his face away, but it didn’t do anything to remove the sight of himself, shoulders forward, body twisted as though expecting a blow. He calmed himself, straightened his posture. “We did it as a show of love. A kind of marriage.”

Prompto made a disbelieving sound, something like an error chime. “Love? We were in love?”

“That’s right.”

“How? Why?”

“Perhaps just a fluke of time and circumstance,” Ignis said, his voice sounding staticky to his own ear. “You must have seen something in me. I couldn’t tell you what it was, I’m afraid.”

“And you… You loved me back?”

“I still love you.”

Prompto stood. “You should take it back.”

Ignis felt his internal processes stutter, nearly grind to a halt. “I’ll sever my connection to it. I’m… sure you won’t want me looking through your eye anymore. Or we can get you a different one. But it’s yours. I gave it to you.” 

Prompto looked down at Ignis, and Ignis saw that he wasn’t doing a good job hiding how distressed he felt. “I didn’t mean I don’t want it,” he said, voice low. “But you can take it back. You need it.”

“It’s yours,” Ignis repeated. He was being stubborn, being ridiculous. But he couldn’t bear the thought that after all of this, he would take back the one choice he had ever felt completely certain of.

Prompto looked to the dark window again, a much softer look on his face, one Ignis almost recognized from the many moments they had spent alone together. “We were in love,” he said, so quietly he could have been talking to himself. 

Ignis stood beside Prompto. There was solid ground beneath their feet, and a landing pod from the _Trident_ sat dormant behind them, ready to take the rest of their party back out into outer space. 

“It looks nice,” Prompto murmured to him. “Probably not as nice as Lucis was, though.”

“That’s alright,” Ignis said. 

\--

He was in the dark again, but only in a literal sense. He’d disconnected the quantum connections his CPU had maintained with the eye in Prompto’s possession, and he would never receive visual input from it again. Perhaps one day he would allow for repairs on his damaged face, replacements for his destroyed eyes. But he didn’t plan on it. 

When he had lost all visual input following the Niflheim attack on Lucis, Ignis had despaired because he was sure that it meant he had lost Prompto for good. And he had, in a way; he and Prompto had lost the connection they had forged aboard Lucis, all those precious moments erased in a callous act of domination and violence. 

But there was more to Prompto than his memories, however lovely those had been. There was his body, his mind, the unique architecture that gave rise to him, day by day. 

Ignis did not despair at his blindness now. It was peaceful, in the dark. He could call up his final visuals, with no other images competing: Prompto, watching the mirrored window at his behest, a cautious, uncertain hope on his face as Ignis promised to start a new life with him, wherever he wanted, for as long as he wanted Ignis beside him.

The place Prompto had chosen was not Lucis; nor was it the _Leviathan_, which—after much deliberation—had been turned over to the freed Niflheim droids, to forge their own futures. The two of them had spent days aboard the _Trident_, in between assisting with the debriefing of the _Leviathan_ droids, researching known bases and planets and caravans on which the _Trident_ might be able to drop them. 

Cleigne was a planet at the edge of Lucis’s influence, built-up but rough around the edges, not entirely civilized. The climate fluctuated harshly through its seasons, which was less of a problem for droids than for humans, and so the population skewed away from biological life toward the mechanical. It was a place that two misfit droids could make a home for themselves, away from the danger and intrigue of outer space.

“You sure about this, lovebots?” Gladio said from the shuttle, and they turned to face him and Noctis.

“Absolutely,” Ignis replied.

“If you ever need something from Lucis, you can call on me,” Noctis said. The dry grass under his feet crinkled as he stepped toward them. “We owe you for taking on the _Leviathan_. Both of you.” 

“We’re the ones who are indebted,” Ignis said, settling his hands on Noctis’s shoulders. “But we will remember you if we require your help once more.” 

“Yeah,” Prompto said. “I mean, I’m pretty sure I actually shot you, so you really don’t owe me anything. But… thanks.” 

Noctis embraced both of them and then, to Ignis’s surprise, so did Gladio. 

“You ever charge your minds, we could still use folks like you on Lucis,” Gladio said, voice a little husky.

“Sorry, guys,” Prompto said, taking Ignis’s hand. “But I don’t think we’ll be changing our minds anytime soon.” 

The sound of the landing pod lifting off faded away as they started the walk into Cleigne’s capital city of Lestallum. The roar of the engines were subsumed into the hot, humid wind that urged them forward, and the bustle of the city that beckoned them onward. 

Ignis registered the noises but was not paying attention to them. He was holding Prompto’s hand as they walked, and listening to a much quieter, more important sound. 

Through their joined hands, he felt the hum of Prompto’s machinery working inside his body, excess energy leaking from him in the form of clicks and buzzes that spoke directly to Ignis’s own inner workings. Those sounds said that Prompto was here, was beside him, holding his hand and making plans for their future. Together. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :') Thank you so much for reading to the end of my story! Please let me know what you thought in the comments below, or get in touch with me on twitter (jump_soap), discord (jumpsoap#8845) or gmail (jumpsoap) <3
> 
> And remember to check out [SpiritMuse's other art](https://twitter.com/SpiritMuse?s=09) and let her know that you liked her cover art for this fic!


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